COTS-Based Stick-On Electricity Meters for Building Submetering Michael C
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3482 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 14, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014 COTS-Based Stick-On Electricity Meters for Building Submetering Michael C. Lorek, Student Member, IEEE, Fabien Chraim, Student Member, IEEE, Kristofer S. J. Pister, and Steven Lanzisera, Member, IEEE Abstract— We demonstrate a low-cost, 19 mm × 12 mm prototype peel-and-stick electricity meter (PASEM) PCB to replace traditional in-circuit-breaker-panel current and voltage sensors for building submetering. The PASEM sensors are installed on the external face of circuit breakers to generate voltage and current signals at a 1920 Hz sample rate. This allows for the computation of real and apparent power as well as captur- ing harmonics created by nonlinear loads. The prototype sensor is built using commercially available components, resulting in a component cost of under $10 per PASEM in moderate quantities. With no high-voltage install work requiring an electrician, this leads to an installed system cost that is roughly ten times lower than traditional submetering technology. Measurement results from lab characterization as well as a real-world residential dwelling installation are presented, verifying the operation of our proposed PASEM sensor. The PASEM sensor can resolve breaker power levels below 10 W and consumes ∼16 mA from a 5 V supply. Index Terms— Building submetering, circuit breaker, electricity meter, energy meter, power meter, smart building. I. INTRODUCTION LECTRICITY usage in the USA is responsible for E40% of our primary energy expenditure and carbon emissions [1]. Commercial buildings research shows that electricity submetering combined with data analytics and maintenance follow-up can reduce a building’s electricity use by 10% to 30% [2]–[5]; it is very likely that similar energy savings can be achieved in industrial (and possibly residential) environments. However, very few buildings are outfitted with the meters required to enable these savings because of the high cost of installation. In order to enable the worldwide reduction of building electricity usage, it is critical to develop electricity metering technologies that provide more granular energy information with dramatically reduced install costs. Manuscript received April 1, 2014; revised May 21, 2014; accepted July 24, 2014. Date of publication August 12, 2014; date of current version August 26, 2014. This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Building Technologies Program, U.S. Department of Energy, Baltimore, MD, under Contract DE-AC02- Fig. 1. (a) Traditional current-transformer-based panel submeter installation. 05CH11231. This paper was presented at the IEEE Sensors Conference. The (b) Wiring diagram showing voltage and current measurement signal lines. associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Prof. David A. Horsley. M. C. Lorek, F. Chraim, and K. S. J. Pister are with the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, University of California at Berkeley, Today’s commercially available circuit breaker panel Berkeley, CA 94720 USA (e-mail: [email protected]; chraim@ submetering technologies require bulky current transform- eecs.berkeley.edu; [email protected]). S. Lanzisera is with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, ers (CTs) and voltage connections to be installed inside the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA (e-mail: panel; a photo of a traditional submetering installation is [email protected]). shown in Figure 1a, and a wiring diagram of the system in Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Figure 1b. To install a system such as this, an electrician must Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2014.2346765 either shut down the building’s power or perform dangerous 1530-437X © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. LOREK et al.: COTS-BASED STICK-ON ELECTRICITY METERS FOR BUILDING SUBMETERING 3483 hot work on the panel. The installer must open the electrical panel and spend significant time to install metering compo- nents, as well as external conduit and enclosures to cover the equipment and signal leads. The total insallation cost is subsequently dominated by the labor required to carefully install all hardware, conduit, and wiring by highly-skilled tradespeople, while also adhering to safety and building code requirements [4], [5]. This results in an installed cost that , − , Fig. 2. PASEM system block diagram showing sensing techniques, PASEM, is approximately $1 500 $5 000 per panel. Thus, a typical and wireless base station. mid-size, mid-life commercial building requiring several tens of metering points can cost up to $100,000 for three-phase submetering, resulting in a payback period in excess of ten years. Therefore, a great need exists for a circuit breaker panel submetering system that can be installed without an electrician for minimal time and money investment. To meet these goals, it has been proposed to replace the in-panel hardware with non-contact-based sensor devices on the outside of the circuit breakers. This provides a number of benefits. First, installation on the outside of the circuit breaker panel does not require an electrician. Second, since the system is self-contained on the exterior panel face, no external wiring or conduit must be installed. While non- contact-based energy meters have previously been presented in the literature, they suffer from multiple drawbacks that make widespread deployment difficult, and limit the practical value of the data that is acquired. Multiple works have shown current magnitude sensors based on a custom MEMS process, but these systems do not sense the line voltage and, thus, cannot calculate real power dissipation [6]–[9]. Many of these systems also have low sampling rates that don’t perform well with non-linear loads, and prevent the ability to detect and diagnose load faults by examining the spectral content of the acquired signals. In [10], a 1 kHz current signal sample rate is reported, however the sensor itself is too large to submeter individual circuit breakers, and the system has difficulty dealing with multi-phase power systems. In this paper, we present the design of a Peel-and-Stick Electricity Meter (PASEM) sensor PCB built using Commer- cial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, in a 19×12 mm form factor suitable for metering individual circuit breakers. We believe that a PASEM design based on commercially available components is practical for widespread adoption due to its Fig. 3. PASEM system installation on circuit breaker panel. Five PASEM devices installed with wireless base station at bottom. Circuit breakers labeled standard PCB fabrication and assembly requirements. Our for reference. sensor measures a circuit breaker’s current and voltage with a 1 kHz analog front end bandwidth and 1920 Hz sampling A. PASEM Board rate. The system shows very good measurement performance and the PASEM can be built for a component cost below $10 Each PASEM sensor board is equipped with an analog front in moderate quantities. end for current and voltage signal conditioning, as well as a Texas Instruments MSP430G2131 microcontroller. Details of the sensing and analog circuits will be discussed in Section III. II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW The entire PASEM board consumes around 16 mA from a In this section, an overview of each panel submetering 5V supply. A close-up image of the 19 × 12 mm assembled hardware subsystem and the flow of sensor data will be PASEM PCB board can be seen in Figure 4. The cost discussed. A block diagram of the in-panel system can be breakdown of the components on the PASEM PCB is shown seen in Figure 2, and a photo of a real installation in our lab in Table I, quoted from large electronic component distributors with five metered breakers can be seen in Figure 3. The entire for a quantity of 100 PASEM boards. system is powered by one standard AC-DC converter plugged The PASEM’s microcontroller is used for two purposes in into a nearby power outlet. our system: sampling the analog voltage and current sense 3484 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 14, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2014 Fig. 4. Assembled peel-and-stick electricity meter with U.S. quarter dollar coin for size reference. Fig. 5. Signal processing block diagram showing current and voltage analog TABLE I sensing circuits, and DSP real power calculation technique. SIMPLIFIED BILL OF MATERIALS FOR PASEM BOARD the data to a cloud-based Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile (sMAP) server [11] for convenient viewing. III. SENSING IMPLEMENTATION A. Voltage Sensing The analog circuits used for our capacitive voltage sensing scheme can be seen in Figure 5. The sense capacitance is essentially a parallel-plate capacitor formed between the signals, and transmitting samples to the wireless base station bottom metal plane of the PASEM board and the conductor via a wired bus. To preserve information in the harmonics of in the circuit breaker. For large capacitive coupling, careful the sensed current signals, a 1920 Hz sampling rate is used in PASEM board layout consideration was practiced to keep the 10-bit microcontroller ADC. This sampling frequency was the bottom layer densely filled with metal. Assuming the selected because it is a power-of-two multiple of the 60Hz fun- sense capacitance remains constant, the capacitor current can damental line frequency, enabling straightforward computation be monitored to obtain the time-derivative of the breaker’s v ( ) of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) without aliasing. Thirty line voltage: d L t = isense . The amplitude of this signal is dt Csense two samples (one 60 Hz cycle) of both the voltage and current controlled by the value of Rbias and is buffered with an opamp sense signals are stored in the microcontroller’s memory at all to drive the ADC input.